Posted
by
Zonk
on Friday January 26, 2007 @05:21PM
from the welcome-to-the-world-of-tomorrow dept.

FiringSquad has up a piece running down a bunch of games that we know are on the horizon, but have precious few details about. Without even names to describe them, the article talks about projects like Bioware's MMOG, the next original title from id, Tim Schaefer's new game for Vivendi, and whatever the premier title for John Romero's new studio. The article taken as a whole is short on details, but brings to light several titles that are sure to provoke public interest when they are finally announced. From the article: "Psychonauts was a rarity in games; a title that had a quirky and fun game design that was actually funny and original. The high sales, however, did not occur as expected. The acclaim that DoubleFine got for their first title helped to secure their publishing deal with Vivendi and that hopefully will give their next title more of a marketing boost than Majesco created for their first game. So what will it be like? Quirky, fun and original ... just like all of Tim Schafer's titles."

Dead or Alive: Code Chronos has been a "mystery title" from Team Ninja for some time now. I'm not sure anyone knows what genre of game it even is, despite it having been announced years ago at this point.

Itagaki likes to concentrate on one project at a time, and I believe now that he's done wasting his time on DOAX2 he's working on Ninja Gaiden 2 for the Xbox 360. Code Chronos is supposed to follow, but what is it??

There's also the mystery of what Nintendo's next Wii-centric Zelda title will be like, bu

Without even names to describe them, the article talks about projects like Bioware's MMOG, the next original title from id, Tim Schaefer's new game for Vivendi, and whatever the premier title for John Romero's new studio.

I heard John Romero was working on a sequel to his last blockbuster. That's right. Daikatana Forever, starring Samuel L. Jackson as your sidekick Superfly. The whole game takes place on an airliner full of snakes.

Seriously, if I'd reveiewed Psychonauts for the PS2, you'd have some serious down marks for the load times, particularly for the store just outside the starting area. It's two small rooms! It doesn't need 30 second load times in each direction! Geez, did you let the development team for Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly do your loading code?

Psychonauts was such a great game I don't even recall the loading times. What I do remember was everytime I went into a new level I wanted to know what the hell these guys were on and where do I get some! The grin on my face from the milk man level laster for at least a week.

I really enjoyed the game up until the meat circus level. Then there are 2 sequences where you basically have to play perfectly for a period of about 5 minutes or start the sequence over from scratch. I'm talking about "Help the kid catch the bunny" and "Prove to your dad you are an acrobat".

It almost made me hate the game by the time I was done.

For what it's worth, I purchased it through Steam. On my 2 year old PC, the load times were acceptable... typically

I really enjoyed the game up until the meat circus level. Then there are 2 sequences where you basically have to play perfectly for a period of about 5 minutes or start the sequence over from scratch. I'm talking about "Help the kid catch the bunny" and "Prove to your dad you are an acrobat".

I agree wholeheartedly with that. For an otherwise very easy game, that part was insanely difficult. Especially the part where you have to jump from one wire mesh wall to another while avoiding the flames and the risin

Especially the part where you have to jump from one wire mesh wall to another while avoiding the flames and the rising water.

Exactly. That might have been the single most difficult move in the game. The other insane part is getting the sword throwers to place a sword at just the right place so you can ride it up the rotating backdrop and make a huge jump right to a platform.. Geez!

I remember the mesh part being frustrating, but I think I only had to do it about 10 times. The sword-chucking/ride up to the next meat platform bit? That literally made me put the game down for a whole YEAR.

My three for him would be "make more games!". Overall the gameplay took a backseat to the story, characters & just the well realized concept, I think. A few parts of Meat Circus were too frustrating for me, but that's when I handed the gamepad to my oldest daughter;)
I've noticed after playing about 200 or so PS2 games that load times in general are horrible. But then you have Jak & Daxter, a very early game that had no loads after you started playing...so I guess there's really no excuse for ot

Psychonauts for the PS2 was ported by some third party developers. They were probably the cheapest quote, and it shows. While the game itself is playable for the most part, it has many bugs and issues. For example, while saving a game, the audio gets stuck in a loop. It's very annoying, especially with the long delay when saving. The game also froze up on me a few times, which was even more annoying, although much less frequent. Also, as you mention, the load times were pretty horrible. Quality assu

I can speak to the Xbox version of Psychonauts. While I'm sure it was slow compared to PC, the load times didn't cause me any irritation at all except a rare couple times when I would accidentally "zone" while searching for something and have to wait through two loads to get back on track. Of course, once I modded my Xbox, the load times became miniscule in comparison when running from the hard drive.:)

Xbox load screens were only truly awful in a couple of games that I played. Top Spin was absolutely